By Dominique Venner for Visegrad Post
La Nouvelle Librairie has begun publishing Les Carnets Rebelles by Dominique Venner. In the first volume published at the end of 2021, an anthology of observations and autobiographical anecdotes, reveals the passions and lucidity of this unique historian. The editorial staff offers its readers an extract, probably dated from the beginning of the 1990s, in which Dominique Venner underlines the real issue of the fall of communism in the East. “The movement which is being born and which has as yet no name repudiates liberalism as well as socialism. It is a return to the sources of the peoples.” A reflection that sheds light thirty years later on certain tendencies of the Fidesz in Hungary and the PiS in Poland.
Dominique Venner’s ultimate wish was to found the Iliade Institute. The speakers at the annual symposium, on Saturday 2 April, will work on the theme: “Restoring politics – identity, sovereignty, sanctity”. Our readers will be able to listen to Ferenc Almássy as well as David Engels, they will also find publications by various contributors to the Visegrád Post.
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“The great movement that exploded in Eastern Europe (including the Soviet empire) in the 1990s (visible beginning in 1989) is not, as Western socialists pretend to believe, an aspiration for a sort of social democracy as a substitute for communism. It is a fundamental movement, a national-conservative revolution in a way, which is not an analogy with what is happening in the Third World (or former Third World). “Gorbachevism”, far from leading the way, tries to control and influence this movement to maintain the power of the communist oligarchy under a liberalised (therefore social-democratic) appearance. But the popular uprising that is developing means something else, which is also not a “victory for liberalism” as others wish. It is a movement that combines the rejection of the socialist lie, the fundamental claim of national identity, the awakening of cultures, religious sentiment: not a religious feeling that is withdrawn into the individual sphere as it is the West, but the expression of an identity through community, ethnicity and nationality: all things against which Enlightenment and sister ideologies that were its heirs had risen: French or Anglo-Saxon bourgeois rationalism and Marxist socialism. Powerful yearnings for freedom are not “liberal” yearnings, which are fundamentally individualistic, economic, and identity-denying.
This emerging movement, which has no name yet, repudiates both liberalism and socialism. It is a return to the sources of the peoples.
Gorbachevism finds allies in the Western intelligentsia. It is characteristic (satirical even) that the French and Western leaders publicly wanted an armed Soviet intervention in Romania during the collapse of Ceausescu (programmed by the KGB) in the last days of 1989, then approved another intervention, at the beginning of 1990, in Azerbaijan. The Western intelligentsia is tinkering with the concepts of a new social democracy, a label now claimed in the East, in Poland, Hungary or in the GDR by all communist parties pretending to scuttle themselves in order to better maintain themselves. But peoples of Eastern Europe do not let themselves be fooled.
The only voices that come from the West, those of the intelligentsia, therefore only reinforce this tyranny of lies which has enslaved populations since 1945. It is not from the West that aid will come to the great libertarian and national uprising, but of this uprising itself and it is he who will perhaps help the West to free itself from its own lies and its own servitude.
The only voices that should be “allowed” in the West today are not those who in the past waited (and worked) for the success of communism (with a human or inhuman face, these are artifices) but those who always fiercely fought communism.
The only institution that appeared to be truly moribund at the start of the 1990s was not the KGB, but the EEC, a masterpiece of social-democratic and capitalist technocracy.”
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Dominique Venner, Carnets Rebelles, 2021 (posthumous), Editions de La Nouvelle Librairie